libmusicbrainz-5.0.0 has been introduced to enable the library to be more easily included in Debian due to a conflicting package name. It is identical to libmusicbrainz-4.0.2, with the following exceptions:

1. All include files are now in the musicbrainz5 directory

2. You should now link against libmusicbrainz5 (-lmusicbrainz5)

3. All previously deprecated functions have been removed.

Please note that all future work is likely to only occur on the 5.x library, so this should be used wherever possible.

Tomorrow’s release requires us to update the main server and the search servers at the same time. This presents a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem: We need to build new indexes even before we’ve migrated the database to our new schema.

To accomplish this, I’ve stopped index updating and created a separate database that will allow me to build some indexes that will be a few hours out of date when we release tomorrow. They will be slightly old, but at least we will have indexes that work.

I expect the indexes to be up to date about 3 hours of the release is complete. If you find the indexed search out of date, please use the direct search in the meantime.

Universal Music in the UK just launched their Artist Gateway, a site to showcase their artists and to provide lots of detail about their artists. Universal is using MusicBrainz IDs and data throughout their system to give their site the proper structure and links to elsewhere on the net. To launch it, Universal put out a slick video, complete with a plug for MusicBrainz:

This is a huge step for MusicBrainz — in the past the labels didn’t even acknowledge our existence and now they are using our data.

A potential customer just nudged me about our use of now deprecated CC licenses and a deprecated Public Domain dedication. We should really address these issues and upgrade our data licenses. We are currently using the following licenses:

The move to the CC license version 3 allows us to use the latest and most robust version of the Creative Commons license. If you’d like lots more detail on what this change means, please read the CC version 3 license “brief” explanation.

The CC0 grant improves a number of aspects of our old Public Domain dedication, especially in jurisdictions outside the US. Our current dedication isn’t sufficient to renounce any copyright over the data in some countries. The CC0 grant is an improved version that maximizes the global coverage of our rejection of copyright for our data.

Summary in plain english: We’d like to move to updated, more robust licenses. We are not changing what data is available under which license, nor are we taking away any rights that end users already have.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here. If there are no objections to this change, I will make it effective with our May 15th release.

We’ve talked a bit about our upcoming schema change release, but we hadn’t nailed down the exact date of the release. Now that we’re tangibly close, we’ve settled on the May 15th as the actual release date.

As some of you may know, this summer through Google Summer of Code I’m working on internationalization of musicbrainz-server. As outlined in my proposal, I’m currently looking to find what I call “language liaisons”: folks willing to be the go-to person about a given language for me and other developers.

Auf Deutsch!

What’s expected of liaisons:

Willing to be pestered occasionally, by me or other developers, about language-specific concerns: when adding new features, and thus adding new strings, we’d like to be able to ensure nothing’s added that will need to be changed before it can be translated into a given language.

Willing to file bugs for strings already in the database that are untranslatable, should you find them.

Be on the musicbrainz-i18n mailing list; this will be the main venue for organization and communication about i18n issues.

Ideally, to be an active translator for your language – but this isn’t a requirement, because I’d like to get the widest global coverage I can; even if a language doesn’t currently have a translation, we don’t want to unintentionally sabotage future translators with untranslatable strings!

日本語

I’ll also be determining a (related) list of “target languages” for the summer, with the intention of releasing translation on musicbrainz.org with these languages at the end of the summer. I’ll consider for inclusion on this list languages that are both in active translation on Transifex and have language liaisons.